


Blackberry Juice

by kitkattaylor



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 08:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17505533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkattaylor/pseuds/kitkattaylor
Summary: inspired by cobalt and cerulean and Han Van Meegeren





	Blackberry Juice

 

She’s hiding in the painting. If you look for long enough, you can see the blackberry juice staining her hands. She’s sat in a perfectly white dress, the blackberries balanced on her knees in a neat wicker basket. The painting looks down on her, as a parent leaning over her, asking her to remove the hand from her mouth. She’s grinning, and the longer you stare into her Cerulean blue eyes, you can see the humour dancing in them, can hear the bumblebee passing by and feel the evening sun on your shoulders. You could taste the blackberries. As it is, with the discoloured layer of grime, varnish and linseed oil, the sun has been hid behind cloud, and there’s paint loss where the stain should be shining.

Leant over the canvas, Phil rolls up his sleeves and carefully removes the stretcher support. A light breeze blows in from behind where the large rectangular window is propped open on its hinges. It’s summer, as it is summer in the painting. The heat seems to hum with the distant city traffic. A column of smoke rises from the kitchens below, and a radio somewhere plays a song that makes Phil smile. The room makes Phil look small, with its high ceilings and large paintings, but Phil is tall, bordering on lanky. Despite his awkwardness, his hands move with assured precision and gentleness. Phil describes himself as a ‘background person.’ Sometimes he’s been so quiet his colleagues have turned the lights out.

The bathroom at the end of the hall is the furthest from Mrs Lauterbach. Phil’s still too afraid to call her by her first name. Most evenings he spends like this. The bathroom is small enough that when Phil crowds his legs onto the toilet seat his knees can touch the walls. Far enough away in her bedroom, Phil can play the pirate radio Mrs Lauterbach would be scandalised by. He closes his eyes and smokes, distantly dreaming of owning his own place.

In the summer, his freckles are prominent and his hair even more ginger. In his white linen shirt, all his colourings seem to stand out more. Despite the echo of his footsteps, he crosses the gallery floor without turning a head. The staffroom is buzzing when he slips through the door. The noise is somehow disguised behind the walls of silent paintings. Phil stalls amidst the unusual activity. There’s a childish excitement thrumming through the air, like that he remembers when he was the new kid at school and his peers grouped away from him in the playground, whispering and giggling, the hopscotch squares empty, the skip rope abandoned.

He asks the first person who crosses his path.

“A new Archeambeau has been found! A real, genuine Archeambeau!”

It’s not hit the news yet. Phil spies the painting propped up, covered in cloth, in Mr Baumgartner’s studio. It’s not till dark – which is of course late in the summer – that Phil gets the chance to see it up close. He’d been asked to clean up, so it was all too easy to flip the cloth up from the painting. Baumgartner had already partially restored it, but it didn’t seem too worse for wear to begin with, just a tear or two there and a frayed canvas edge. Kneeling down and leaning close, Phil could be mistaken for trying to fit into the painting. In a way, he was. He wants to see the painting from the inside, where the artist had lived.

The painting depicts a girl asleep at a piano, the soft skin of her cheek pressed against the cross in her arms. A shadow sits behind her to the right, watching over her. Phil can smell the smoke from the burnt out candle, can hear the ticking grandfather clock. He can feel the black and white notes beneath his finger, where scales have been reluctantly rehearsed. The painting is very dark but the girl’s dress is a vivid blue. Staring at it instantly reminds him where he’s seen it before. Cerulean, like the eyes of the girl with the blackberries, like the blue of Picasso’s blue period, of which he wrote his dissertation and of which demanded his honesty against his usual happy disposition. Here he sees it.

That night he doesn’t play the radio. He still closes his eyes and smokes and hugs himself on the toilet lid. The thoughts play on loop in his head. He’s certain of it. The painting’s a fake. But he, an apprentice, can’t tell the master conservator that, let alone the art director, let alone the world. The backs of his eyelids are Cerulean, the entire inside of body seems to be lined with it. He can’t escape it. He couldn’t prove it, not with a _gut feeling,_ so he’d have to find the artist. Or the criminal. Cerulean wasn’t available until the 1860’s, 40 years after Archeambeau’s death.

/

With gloves, you remove the strip lining. Using warm water, you blot with cotton paper and a weight so that the canvas doesn’t deform. Once the adhesive is removed, you can clean the painting.

/


End file.
